"Yeah, we're raising our series A so we can ink a deal with a Chinese morgue for a steady supply of parts to stitch together, and to scale up our electricity generation to the needed amount so we don't have to depend on the odd lightning bolt, which turns out to be really rare here in Palo Alto"
I don’t see why they bothered drugging the brains. Even if they became conscious, the pig’s bodies are dead and gone. There is nothing to feel, one is simply alone with their thoughts, perhaps even dreams.
Well I'm sure you doing the thought exercise is the same as killing yourself and then reviving yourself 4 hours later to see if you feel any pain, we should all really defer to your scientific ethical expertise in the future.
Just because your brain is where all feelings 'exist' doesn't mean you have the ability to manifest it at will. But the brain does plenty of things to us that we don't want. I don't think excruciating pain would be something a brain-in-a-jar would feel - but it's possible that being deprived of all sensory connections would cause things to get weird quickly. Sort of like phantom limb syndrome!
Your sensory inputs remained connected at all times. That absence is unprecedented in its whole, but we do know that amputated members can hurt, and not just the stump.
Pain is registered by nerves connected to the brain, and given that phantom pain happens even when those nerves are truly gone, its definitely possible the pig brain could interpret it as pain. This is pretty new territory to make strong statements about
I've been hurt in dreams, in ways that do not appear to have been the real world poking through. It's never been great pain, but it's been real pain or something very close to it. There's also phantom limb syndrome [1]. It's not hard to imagine whatever mechanism is in play there could run even more unfettered when there is no feedback from the body at all.
We do not know that simply being severed from your body is simply experiencing no sensory input of any kind, and actually have a lot of reasons to expect that would not be the subjective experience for very long.
(Bizarrely, the dream pain has nothing to do with anything in real life that should have been pain. Apparently my subconscious is fine with dismemberment or stabbing or whatever, but what really bothers it is removing my orthodontic spacer from the roof of my mouth, which apparently it feels is me trying to remove the roof of my mouth. Subconsciouses are weird.)
Oh, good point about pain in dreams! I have also experienced this. I used to have a lot of lucid dreams, where I was often aware of being in a dream. I somehow hurt my left shoulder and was suddenly in excruciating pain. I woke up and my shoulder felt just the same as in the dream, very bad. I quickly examined myself for injury and finding nothing, the pain very quickly went away. I guess I cannot say for sure that it was not physical pain leaking into imagination land but that is certainly not how it felt.
All response experience exists within the brain, yes, but it is only ever made possible through external stimulus. The brain itself doesn't feel anything, but generates those feelings as a response to events outside of itself.
"If it seems strange that nerve signals coming from the back can represent vision, bear in mind that your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happen to travel along different cables. Your brain is encased in absolute blackness in the vault of your skull. It doesn’t see anything. All it knows are these little signals and nothing else. And yet you perceive the world in shades of brightness and colors. Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs the light." — David Eagleman in his book Incognito.
Without the nerves connecting your toe to your brain, you are unlikely to feel the otherwise agonizing pain of having had stubbed it against a coffee table.
Phantom limbs can cause/have pain, partly from the lack of expected predicted feedback. I cannot begin to imagine what sort of chaos, in the dynamical sense, a non-existent body would cause and how that would be represented in the parts of the brain that calculates how to interpret it.
But parts of those nerves are there; you can't really shave them off, they end inside the brain.
Think of it as taking a microprocessor in a circuit and disconnecting every one of its pins except those providing power. How would that microprocessor behave? It's various I/O pins aren't gone, their state and response just became somewhat random.
It sure seems like patterns of cortical activation (or something like that) could be compared to some sort of waking standard to take a very good measured guess at some point.
You have no way of really understanding the magnitude of endless existential dread or physical pain a disembodied brain might perceive, which I think is the primary concern of ethicists.
In order for these sorts of experiments to be ethical with an apparent consciousness we definitely need BCI technology that can simulate input / output stimuli, at least reasonably.
Perhaps the fact the the brain was disconnected from the body was a major factor in why no signs of consciousness were recorded. Consciousness may be the byproduct of a living body sending signals to a living brain.
> Consciousness may be the byproduct of a living body sending signals to a living brain.
Might be, but unlikely. Both our medical and legal (executions) experience shows that most parts of the body can be removed or paralyzed without impacting consciousness. It really seems like the obvious model - that the brain alone is the center of consciousness - is the correct one.
Technically, the medical community only considers physical injury with the term 'pain', but there is growing consensus that pain can be more general (especially considering it is often subjective). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952112/
Fear of being blind and alone, unable to even draw a breath to bleat out a cry for help perhaps? Plus, the pig WAS dead. Even if they are just alone with their thoughts, there probably was some trauma surrounding become an ex-pig.
That's quite the extraordinary claim. Is there any evidence to backup that assertion? As far as I'm aware nobody knows what a living brain detached from the body actually experiences.
This is from the Nature article on the same subject [1]:
> [...] Nevertheless, the development of technology with the potential to support sentient, disembodied organs has broad ethical implications for the welfare of animals and people. “There isn’t really an oversight mechanism in place for worrying about the possible ethical consequences of creating consciousness in something that isn’t a living animal,” says Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale who worked with Sestan’s team. He says that doing so might be ethically justifiable in some cases — for instance, if it enable scientists to test drugs for degenerative brain diseases on the organs, rather than people.
Gauging awareness in a brain outside a body would probably be difficult, given that the organ’s surroundings would differ so radically from its natural environment. “We could imagine that brain could be capable of consciousness,” says George Mashour, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who studies near-death experiences. “But it’s very interesting to think about what kind of consciousness, in the absence of organs and peripheral stimulation. [...]”
It's also 'very interesting to think' how many more dimensions this could add to torture. This is the end of the article:
> [...] In the meantime, scientists and governments are left to confront the legal and ethical quandaries related to the possibility of creating a conscious brain without a body. “This really is a no-man’s land,” says Koch. “The law will probably have to evolve to keep up.”
Koch wants a broader ethical discussion to take place before any researcher tries to induce awareness in a disembodied brain. “It is a big, big step,” he says. “And once we do it, it’s impossible to reverse it.”
Ethic implications = Somebody unethtical runs with it, until the economics of scale make the crime unattractive and the ethic dilemma is replaced with a cheap - ehtically netural alternative.
At least there where meetings with free soft drinks and canapes.
There won't be any pain as brains don't have nerve endings. But you won't have any other senses too. Just pitch blank, deathly silence, floating for eternity.
"floating", "silence", and "black" are sensory states. There's no assurance that a brain in a pool would feel any of these. It's hard to know what a brain will project as it attempts to construct a reality matching that for which it evolved.
But it's reasonable to use these terms since they're the best approximations/guesses we have.
Also, people who become blind later in life often describe it as "black", so I think it's reasonable to assume that's how the brain would interpret lack of sense.
> (If they're explicitly trying to cause me pain, that would be a no.)
That is my point.
I imagine that, if this was a possibility, quite a lot of people would be ok (or even demand it) to make available "150 years after natural death" sentences, so that they can apply it to their newly deposed dictator. Then, once the new rulers become entrenched in power and begin to like it, they can start using it on their political opponents. Prisoner exchanges between warring countries could become quite interesting. Quite likely, some people might feel inclined to hang on to their loved ones forever. Remember Terri Schiavo [1]?
Feel free to imagine more interesting scenarios. If you don't start to shudder, you're just not thinking big enough. You can watch this Black Mirror episode [2] to get you started.
This gives a whole new meaning to the expression "killer application".
Bad movie, not so great book, but aren't Stalker's from Mortal Engines basically the same thing. Dead and brought back to serve.
I will be curious if they can not only resuscitate but also influence what is left? plus would it matter if your a victim of a seizure? would there be anything left that we see as a human personality to bring back? I ask that from experience of losing a middle aged uncle to a seizure, it raises your body temperature sufficiently to kill/wipe the brain. You can coma them to stop the activity but bringing them back up from that is no guarantee anyone is home
In Blindsight by Peter Watts, there are a group of revived soldiers that serve as mercenaries. Upon dying, they are 'resurrected' and immediately given a choice to go back to being dead -or- pay off the resurrection fee by serving as a zombie soldier for 8-10 years. If they survive their service, they are free to continue living in whatever mangled state their body currently is. They unaware/unconscious while serving, so they won't have any memory of the horrors that they commit or are acted upon them.
It would be strange to return to your life after dying 10 years ago, but I'd probably take the deal.
The "what if they wake me up to torture me" scenarios seem like wild catastrophizing to me - if someone has the political power and resources to develop special brain-torture gear, rez me, and keep me alive so they can torture me, they have the political power and resources to kidnap me and torture me with knives and fire as long as they want. It'd probably even be easier for them to do it to my physical body, right here and right now.
It sounds like the real worry is "what if I wake up in a dystopian future". And, of course, once you look at that, the expected value calculation is trivial. Consider the set of futures which have sufficiently-developed research and economy to systematize the operation of and systematically execute on rezzing random frozen brains. Consider the set of futures which have that property but are also dystopian enough to rez brains for the sole purpose of torturing them. Recall that these things are in tension; the kinds of irrationalities that lead a civilization to do that kind of thing will impair them in other ways, sometimes significantly - enmity from less-extreme polities, toxic culture leading to structural inefficiency, etc. You have to reach really far to find that region of the configuration space of possible future worlds.
So look at the expected values. Yes, being tortured for a while would suck. But being alive again, and possibly even biologically immortal, has the expected value of an entire new life. And the probabilities say that being rezzed is far more likely in a good future than a bad future. Literally every stage of the expected-value calculation says that being rezzed can be expected to be a win.
Given enough time, anything with a non-zero probability of happening will eventually happen, and when you're dealing with the prospect of immortality, "enough time" is a given.
Even if the optimistic scenario is true for your first 100 "rezzes", the 101st civilization that takes over after the 100th collapses might not be so nice.
EDITED TO ADD: Moreover "the kinds of irrationalities that lead a civilization to do that kind of thing" is confusing a value judgment with rationality. An extremely predatory civilization might maintain its edge through cruelty, the same way that cats seem to play with mice before killing them. That would be evil, but rational.
what about “everything is fine forever” as a possible thing with a non-zero probability of happening (which then does happen)? how does that confound the calculus?
I'm with you. Once dead I'd prefer to stay dead. It's actually a comforting thought to know that my life will end. For me it brings meaning to the life that I do still have.
The comments in this thread to the tune of "anything is better than being dead" actually kind of took me by surprise.
I can conceive of a point where technology and society has developed to a place where bodies are replaced after death with something that's worth "living" in again, but that's a long way from wanting to be a brain in a vat purely because it means I'm not technically dead.
Will you know you're dead though? If they have the technology to bring your brain back, they probably have the technology to make your brain think you're still in your body and you woke up.
> Please make sure I am supplied with some good books to read, if at all possible.
Seeing as we don't have full eye transplants yet, it seems possible (at lest with near future tech) that they could resuscitate your brain but not your other I/O peripherals, including your eyes. To misquote Harlan Ellison, you may have no mouth with which to scream.
It seems to me that your average case would involve either total darkness or the worst case of phantom limb ever. Or even worse: they might give you eyes, but no one to turn the pages for you.
Well, that's why I specified "if at all possible." :)
I'd imagine that if we do establish "IO" that "text" would be the first/easiest type of data. It might be encoded in a strange way, but, well, I'll have plenty of time to adapt...
I’m sorry but this feels like an ignorant view. Brain relies on sensory information coming from inside the body - hunger, bodily awareness, skin temperature, etc.
Without these signals, we have no clue whether you’ll be in immense confusion, anxiety, sadness or bliss. It could very well be much worse than death,
“We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?”
I would suggest a different action for this specimen. Previously, specimens were terminated. Valuable information is lost.
If specimen 46, Vat 7 experiences a romantic relationship, our corporation will gain valuable research on emotional development past nihilism stage. Suitable partners are:
Specimen 114, Vat 7
Specimen 126, Vat 7
Specimen 67, Vat 89 (pending switch)
I can't wrap my head around what it would be like to exist merely as a consciousness within my brain, lacking any sensory organs to perceive the surrounding world. Of course, I've also never been in a sensory deprivation tank.
The thing with those tanks is that it’s effortless to do a sanity check and receive immediate input anytime you like. You can touch the tank, lift the lid, etc.
My naive guess is that, although very jarring at first, most people would actually get used to it in not too long of a time. Humans adapt easily. Also, if they can achieve that feat, they could probably also trick the brain into feeling like it has robotic or virtual body parts.
Maybe people with locked-in syndrome could provide some reports of what it's like. It's not the exact same, but it may be similar.
For sure. I was assuming a hypothetical ultra-futuristic scenario where the vat brains could communicate with each other via some mechanism, and could access the Internet and consume media and such. Basically you could be just as social as any homebody; just without the body. And maybe they could do some kind of VR body projection thing that mimics all the physical senses. Solitude is a separate matter.
It'd actually be fantastic. If I've donated my brain to anything like the modern research apparatus, I can be relatively sure of one of two possibilities: Either my brain was chosen as a test, in which case the project is on the news literally worldwide and the ethics have had the crap argued out of them and I can be sure that any limitations of the environment are due to technological shortcomings and I get to participate in fixing it, or I'm part of a follow-up trial or large-scale roll-out, in which case they'll have fixed up the rest of the issues. In the first case I get to be a grad student again, albeit with a bit of a disability. In the second case, I'm catching a rez from a reasonably reliable medical procedure and the major issues have already been worked out. In both cases I'm no longer dead, and these scenarios are nowhere near having enough downsides to outweigh that.
> It'd actually be fantastic [...] Either my brain was chosen as a test, [...] or I'm part of a follow-up trial or large-scale roll-out
Or your enemies took power, and when they were going through the vats for payback they picked yours (along with many others). If you think you have no enemies, or that you know them all personally, you are better than me.
Is it really that weird to not have "enemies"? There I people I wouldn't hang out with or wouldn't work with again, but I don't think I'd consider them enemies.
Does it? In an age where people will go through 10 years of social media history to discredit someone they have never met, the only way to not have enemies is to never say anything controversial in the public eye. Granted, that's probably a majority of people, but it isn't paranoia to suggest that there are people extreme enough to try to ruin your life just because you have different opinions.
If you are Jewish, anti-Semites are your enemy, even if you've never met them personally.
If you are a person of color, white supremacists are your enemy, even if you have never personally met them.
Etc.
Your remark comes across to me like "I live an extremely privileged and cushy life and I think that's completely the norm. I'm not interested in understanding the reality of people for whom that's not the norm."
that is the norm, for that person and it's perfectly within his right to announce his experience. You falsely imply that it's anyone's duty to share in the misery of the human race or the consequences that come from believing in the supernatural. And the "priveleged" term is just a dog-whistle for a political agenda that has no place here.
If you think "privilege" is only a political dog-whistle, then you must also believe every person is born with equal chance and opportunity without regard for race, gender, or anything else. Can you say that with full intellectual honesty?
And what part of being targeted for skin color is a "consequence that come[s] from believing in the supernatural?"
if reducing complex issues into simple dichotomies works for you, I'm not going to convince you otherwise. But the fact that you need such crutches tells me all I need to know about this conversation.
Privilege is absolutely a thing, not just a dog whistle.
If you're not convinced, try changing your frame of reference. Don't think of white males as being privileged. Trying to convince people of that is often a useless endeavour.
Instead, recognize the disadvantage PoC have. Most reasonable people will believe PoC have a harder time than white people. That's what white privilege is. It's not dealing with the additional hardships that PoC deal with. White privilege doesn't mean having the world being handed to you because you're white. It means not having the world taken away just because you're not white.
I guess it depends on how you define enemies. I think that generally an enemy is considered to be someone who is actively hostile towards you in a specific way, rather than just a general way.
If you ask someone to name three friends, they wouldn't consider all friendly people, they would consider their actual friends.
If you ask someone to name three enemies you would expect them to name specific people they actually know and have interacted with, not specific people that are known to hate their race or belief but they have had no direct interaction with.
In most cases, you don't actually want to publicize whom you see as personal enemies. It just makes it harder to resolve or minimize the issue while convincing a lot of people you are a paranoid fruitcake.
But I imagine lots of minority members et al are keenly aware of specific people who are generally against their minority group who have caused them, personally, harm because of it.
If they publicly start their view that "X person personally harmed me" it is usually unprovable and the statement just makes their own problems worse for various reasons.
Thus my impression that you must have an awfully cushy life that you are projecting as the norm when there is zero reason to see it as such.
It's very weird to think that people would even care enough about a dead person to single out your brain for "payback". Even weirder to think that these people would somehow be in power.
This idea was somewhat explored in Iain M. Banks _surface detail_, after death, your conciousness would be put into a virtual hell if you 'sinned' in your physical life and that the hells were used as a deterrent
> Is it really that weird to not have "enemies"? There I people I wouldn't hang out with or wouldn't work with again, but I don't think I'd consider them enemies.
You made the assumption that I considered them enemies, or that they would even know who I am. If I am an identifiable member of the wrong community, social group, or race from the point of view of the mob in power, I don't have to consider them my enemy in order for them to see me (or my family, or friends) as one. Do you want to contemplate the possibility of genocides, of which we have seen plenty in the last 30 years, being replaced by "vaticides"? Because once the technology allows it, it will happen.
I've lived through this kind of historic upheaval once already; I know that of which I speak. The point I'm making is that any new technology can and will eventually be used by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and that the likelihood for that to happen is directly proportional to its potential for good. We better make sure that potential good is really in balance with the potential bad before we commit to bringing it to life (pun intended).
It just means you live in a very privileged world.
If, say, you're a black lesbian feminist, you can live the most saintly life, there are plenty of people who are your enemies, and who'd delight at the idea of being able to hurt you. Despite never having anything done to you.
Or, if that's too contemporary, you can be the nicest Jewish person in all of Hitler's Germany, and it still wouldn't save you.
If that's too Godwin's law, just be poor. There is a good chunk of people who'd be perfectly OK with experimenting on you, just because you're a drain on society's resources. And we can continue on - there are any number of axes along which society separates, and there are always people who consider "the other" an enemy, or, worse, something not even human.
Enmity and dehumanization isn't necessarily mutual, but you need a very strong support system to be able to ignore that it still exists.
Your brain is one of the first 543 experiments in a private laboratory. Researchers convinced ethical board that brains were not really alive. Brains were kept alive average 3 years, but no "contact" was officially attempted to avoid legal or ethical issues. There are rumors of some extracurricular activity happening.
Your contribution is not wasted however. First brain that was able to talk to the world and received full human rights was Peter Thiel's brain.
This Reminds me of Scalzi's "Locked In" series where a disease causes a portion of the population to be conscious, but totally disconnected from their bodies. The supplemental material describes I how the first attempts to interact with these people was performed on prison inmates.
I don't think you're appreciating what it would be like.
Sure, at first, the peacefulness of absolute sensory deprivation would probably feel pretty relaxing.
But then, it never ends. An eternity (or as long as your brain was kept alive) of nothing. You see nothing. You hear nothing. You feel, taste, and smell nothing.
If you're lucky, you'd start building a fake reality to imagine yourself in, like a dream. Over time, maybe you'd accept this reality as being real. People that lose a sense such as sight often gain an enhancement in another sense such as hearing. Maybe with the loss of all senses, the brain's imagination could gain more power.
I thought maybe looking into how people in comas experience their time, but apparently it's common for them to have experienced much of what happened around them as a hazy dream[1], which means a lot of sensory input was still being processed. I'm not sure what it would be like to actually lose all sensory input. There's probably some disease that causes this, so maybe I'll stumble on it eventually, but even then we'll only get answers at this point if it's reversible...
The 2015 game SOMA[1] paints a far darker picture of precisely this topic: a brain donated to research. It really explores this in depth. If you're remotely interested in games I can only recommend it.
I'd just like to chime and second the recommendation. Gameplay aside the story that it paints is amazingly well done and makes you think a lot about all the possible implications of something like that.
Option 3: the experience of being disconnected from your body is so distressing that you can do nothing but attempt (and fail) to scream. The scientists have no idea you are in distress. This goes on for months or years. By the time technology develops to a point where they can communicate with you, you are irreparably broken.
When beating heart corpses (technically brain dead but body is alive) have their organs removed, in some cases the bodies go through symptoms of a live human being killed by vivisection. These are generally ignored.
Let's hope our understanding of brain death is fully and completely correct.
Years ago, I saw a TV interview of the first recipient of a heart-lung transplant.
When asked some question post surgery, she blurted "I could really use a beer!" She didn't drink, but the young male donor of her organs who died in a motorcycle crash did.
She wrote a book about her experience. Initially, she had bizarre dreams, as if tapping into the psyche of her organ donor. Over time, those stopped.
Mention of this tends to not go over well on HN, though it would be easy enough to google who got the first heart-lung transplant, find her book and read it to confirm if I'm making this up or misremembering it or if it's a true story (at least insofar as me remembering that she claimed such things).
Given how much my personality shifts from relatively minor things like switching between high/low carb diets, or medium things like whatever was in my drip when I went under general anaesthetic, I totally believe that her personality was changed by having a transplant, or separately by her anti-rejection meds.
I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities.
I totally believe that her personality was changed by having a transplant, or separately by her anti-rejection meds.
Thanks.
I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities.
So would I.
I'm not talking about most such changes or statistical significance. I'm talking about one specific case that was unusually well documented and highly scrutinized that potentially supports the idea that "souls" -- or something we might describe with that word -- might actually be real.
A high percentage of people go to church or otherwise have some kind of spiritual belief. But some kind of scientific affirmation that this isn't simply adult thumb sucking and there may be something to it seems pretty uncommon.
I found her story interesting from that angle.
But, I mean, if your mind is made up that souls are nonsense, then you are probably not the target audience for my comment.
Personality transfer by transfer of parts of the body other than the brain, even if it was clear from h evidence, isn't scientific affirmation of the soul, it's scientific reinforcement that the “self” is contained in the body not some separate soul. It contradicts the understanding that the seat of the self in the body is solely and exclusively the brain, but that doesn't support the idea of the soul.
I’m going to have to say “no”; the word comes with a lot of cultural baggage, and it’s not clear what you might mean by “something we might describe with that word” if not Cartesian dualism — not because there are no possibilities, just because those alternatives are not well known.
I'm aware it comes with baggage. That's why I made an effort to qualify it.
I don't personally think it's hugely important whether one prefers the framing of self over soul. The woman told a tale that credibly suggested she got something of his consciousness in the exchange, not just his physical organs.
I realize it matters a whole lot to most people which framing gets used. Again, this is why I did my best to qualify it.
> I don't personally think it's hugely important whether one prefers the framing of self over soul.
The existence of the self, and it being seated in physical organs, is noncontroversial, and in no way particular associated with the spiritual belief of people who go to church. The idea that the self is seated somewhere distinct from the body—the soul—is. So, I think that the “framing” is quite relevant to the connections you tried to draw upthread.
Which isn't to say it's not an interesting anecdote (though, on its own, of very little probative value) either way.
I was replying to a comment that ended with "Let's hope our understanding of brain death is fully and completely correct."
It seemed pertinent to that line of thinking.
There's a fairly rich history of Western Christians who were serious scientists and also sincere believers in God who argued that belief is a matter of faith, God is not provable and there is zero contradiction between being both a Christian and a scientist.
I don't have some personal need to relitigate that point. I'm very aware that some people frame things in terms of religion and some don't.
I don't personally feel it is critically important to pick a camp in order to see the story this woman told as intriguing and potentially casting light upon or at least calling into question some of our current framing concerning brain death being the single most important detail.
I know it's a touchy subject for most people. Whether they believe in a soul and a religious/spiritual framing or not, they tend to feel strongly that the other camp is in the wrong and that this is a really big deal.
I generally agree with the conclusion that "being a believer" is a matter of faith. Some people believe. Some don't.
I believe in souls and reincarnation and so forth. My ex did not. Everyone swore that a marriage could not work if you didn't have the same belief system in that regard.
We both believed in the American Constitutional right of freedom to believe as you saw fit. It was the only thing we didn't fight about in two decades of non stop arguing.
Having different points of view in this matter had no bearing on the decision to divorce.
Souls are probably nonsense, but if there was some evidence we'd all like to see it. A feeling or experience someone has is not evidence. People used to claim all kinds of crazy things that we don't really accept anymore, because people have tested it. Astral travel, influencing people at a distance with their mind, along with the 100s of different religions that all claim their way is the way of god and the others are all just posers.
I'd love to think that my parents and grandparents aren't just gone when they died, that they are somewhere else, alive, functioning, happy. But all evidence points another way.
I would suggest googling variants of beating heart corpse, beating heart donor, and similar terms. I also caution to check the sources of the websites as some of them are very anti-organ donation and are quite biased beyond hope.
Here is a past discussion of a BBC article related to the subject, about 2.5 years old.
Unlikely, it’s probably a lot like a sensory deprivation tank. You likely start to hallucinate after a period of time and deteriorate to some strange state of existence.
The obvious extrapolation is that we're all now brains in jars, and this existence we perceive is a shared hallucination brought on by the jars all being connected to the same keep-the-brains-alive-system.
In all cases i would not lose anything, because i would have already lost everything when dying. So in all cases it's a bonus time, and though being properly resurrected would be great, helping scientific progress and dying is still better than simply dying.
That's very optimistic of you. I can definitely think of a few situations in which I would be better off without that "bonus time". I'm not sure we have enough information to know how a brain would perceive being activated but without most it's sensory organs and the busy it was grown in. If you're used for experimentation before they have a way to communicate, stuck in void with only yourself for company is really a best case scenario.
It's sort of like being given a choice at the time of death. Would you rather everything ended now, or do you want to opt for a small chance at future life if there's also a chance that life consists entirely of torture of one type or another.
It is not about optimism, my point is that pain, torture, death are bad because they deprive you of future possibilities. If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help.
> pain, torture, death are bad because they deprive you of future possibilities
Death does. Pain and torture don't deprive you of your future. They are all about what you have to go through to get to that future, and possibly alter how you are physically and/or mentally in that future.
At an extreme end of the spectrum is complete brain death, but just before that might be extreme brain damage. Would you choose a reality in which you're so mentally diminished that your existence is comprised entirely of terror and confusion? Opting into that, even the possibility of that, especially since once you're in that state, you may no longer be capable of changing your mind?
Even for people that don't believe in the religious version of hell, some might consider this the closest equivalent. The question then becomes, would you subject yourself to the possibility of being in a hell equivalent for an indeterminate amount of time after your death to provide an indeterminate amount of benefit to science?
> If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose
That assumption only works if you assume you can't be brought back, even as a brain in a jar. It doesn't make sense to use assumptions based on death being the ultimate end when reasoning about death not being the ultimate end.
> If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help.
By that reasoning, if there was a program where you could donate your body to science while you're still alive and they could do any tests they want, including live vivisection, would you do so? If not, why is that any different?
> Death does. Pain and torture don't deprive you of your future.
They take your time when you go through them, and possibly break your body in some way, which reduces the number of things you can do in the future.
Of course there may be scenarios where accepting pain or death gives you some advantage, but in that case the pain is not bad! (think dying to keep your children alive, cutting your hand to not die in the desert).
> It doesn't make sense to use assumptions based on death being the ultimate end when reasoning about death not being the ultimate end.
My assumptions are that brain is something that can be simulated on a computer, there is no soul, and that the people who die and are buried cannot be brought back to life. So my choices are either to become brain in a jar for experiments, or feed earthworms.
> By that reasoning, if there was a program where you could donate your body to science while you're still alive and they could do any tests they want
No, because if i am still alive, i can do something more useful for me with my body, but when i am dead, (or at a point when i want euthanasia), i do not have any use of my body, and hell with a small chance of helping people i love is better than nothingness.
> My assumptions are that brain is something that can be simulated on a computer, there is no soul, and that the people who die and are buried cannot be brought back to life. So my choices are either to become brain in a jar for experiments, or feed earthworms.
I think the same regarding the brain. My point is that we are discussing what if your donated brain is revived to the point of consciousness, but without a body, and perhaps without the experimenters realizing consciousness exists (or realizing it and not considering your consciousness worth the same consideration of a full person).
When reasoning about the possibility of that scenario, which is what this thread is about, I don't think it makes sense to use assumptions about death being the ultimate end, because this is specifically about the case where that is false, because you're a brain in jar with consciousness after death.
> No, because if i am still alive, i can do something more useful for me with my body
Not all live people have bodies that can be used. Not all people with useless bodies are useless. Also, this reasoning leads us to having no consideration for any living beings besides those that can communicate and be of use. Is it okay to torture animals for science, if there is a way to do so without causing pain? Should we not consider the case of a brain in a jar then, and whether it feels pain? It's your choice whether you want to subject yourself to the possibility of a tortured existence after death, but I would rather have some laws in place and information on what to expect (i.e. existing cases where we have reason to believe that the regarding the legal status of after death brain testing than going into the future blind.
There's a possibility of upsides (science advancement without torture, possibly life of a sort after death), but also the possibility of downsides (that life after death might be indefinite mental torture). It's not that I'm against donating my brain, it's that I'm against donating my brain given the minimal amount of information we have on outcomes, and how that relates to the extreme mngative worst case I can imagine.
The question is, if we map out a matrix of possibilities with outcomes of no science advancement, science advancement, second life on one axis, and no consciousness, consciousness but not you (amnesia), your consciousness but impaied, your consciousness close to your current capabilities on the other axis, some of those paired outcomes are what I would consider completely unacceptable, and others would be absolutely wonderful, and then there's various middling levels in between. The problem is there's no idea currently what the chances of any of those are, so am I willing to gamble a completely unacceptable outcome for the chance of a wonderful outcome given no odds?
When we learn how to keep brain in a jar, then i agree that brain is a person and we need all the normal laws.
But until that the choices we have here are nothingness and an experiment with unknown outcome. Given this choice i don't see any experiment that is worse than the nothingness.
Btw. if you agree that brain is equivalent to a program that can run on a computer, then you should also agree that pain, infinite torture and other "hellish" things are not a big deal, they are just pointless computations.
> Btw. if you agree that brain is equivalent to a program that can run on a computer, then you should also agree that pain, infinite torture and other "hellish" things are not a big deal, they are just pointless computations.
That only follows if you think that about your life right now. If you think it's not a big deal right now, then it's not a big deal if you're a brain in a jar. If it is a big deal right now, then it is a big deal if you're a brain in a jar.
Pain is useful for living organisms as a variable to use in our fitness functions (minds) that allows us to avoid situations that decrease our survival rate. Ir may be mostly useless for a brain in a jar, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be ignored.
One can make an argument that complete rationality should discard feelings and work only on whether something is useful or not. I think that argument is incorrect when taken to that extreme, as it looks at a shorter horizon than the evolutionary scale which has produced us, to good effect. I would argue that the social aspect of our species is what has allowed us to not only thrice, but completely dominate the environment we are in. To ignore our empathy is to ignore what has brought us to this point.
We can say that a brain in a jar in pain should not be catered to because it has nothing to provide (which also might be incorrect), but by that reasoning we should also say that the person in hospice with weeks or months left to life with no relatives should not be catered to. Should we cause pain to or end the existence of each of those without any regard to their own feelings? We could just as easily use the person in hospice for testing. Amazing scientific discoveries could be unearthed.
But if we agree that emotion has played a positive role in the development of the species, then "hellish" things and the avoidance of them is not pointless computation.
> But until that the choices we have here are nothingness and an experiment with unknown outcome. Given this choice i don't see any experiment that is worse than the nothingness.
Given the known outcome of coming back after death for an existence of even known time, say one week, where that time comprised of pain and suffering exclusively, I would opt to not have that time, thus opting for nothingness. Given an outcome I would not choose, and an outcome I would choose, it them becomes an equation of what is the likelihood of each, and how much to I want or want to avoid each.
Given that the possible negative outcome is as close to the biblical interpretation of hell as I can imagine, and one of the benefits of being an atheist is not having to worry about that, I'm not in a hurry to opt into something that then provides that possibility. That's what I was getting at before.
If you take the next step from brain in a jar, to the brain on hard disk, (where there is unlimited opportunity to copy, to take snapshots and to reset the state at will) would you still think that torturing a brain is a big deal?
Do you think that simply carrying out a computation can be immoral? I think no, and the difference between experimenting on a real person and a person in your simulation is that in the second case nothing would exist if you didn't spend your resources to run the simulation, (or in the original context spend resources to revive a discarded brain).
> Given that the possible negative outcome is as close to the biblical interpretation of hell as I can imagine, and one of the benefits of being an atheist is not having to worry about that
Interesting, i have never thought of this as a benefit, to me the hell seemed better because there you do not die, and logically have a chance to get out, because of love and forgiveness preached by some parts of the bible.
> If you take the next step from brain in a jar, to the brain on hard disk, (where there is unlimited opportunity to copy, to take snapshots and to reset the state at will) would you still think that torturing a brain is a big deal?
Yes. If something can experience pain, I think it's immoral to cause pain when it's unnecessary. If something is sentient, I think it's immoral to stop sentience without reason.
> Do you think that simply carrying out a computation can be immoral? I think no, and the difference between experimenting on a real person and a person in your simulation is that in the second case nothing would exist if you didn't spend your resources to run the simulation, (or in the original context spend resources to revive a discarded brain).
Yes. If you run a simulation that works on sentient AI's, then IMO mistreating them is immoral. I view them as life, and creating life comes with responsibilities.
Importantly, I think this view is important otherwise morality breaks down entirely. There's a chance we're all in a simulation right now. Does that mean nothing we do to each other can be immoral? What if we could prove we were in a simulation? That that free people form moral constraints?
> Interesting, i have never thought of this as a benefit, to me the hell seemed better because there you do not die, and logically have a chance to get out, because of love and forgiveness preached by some parts of the bible.
I'm not a bible scholar, but to my understanding, you go to hell for "eternity". Given the mystical nature of the whole supposition, I don't think it's useful to believe it existence is correct but the unescapability is not.
exactly, but it doesn't help if we say that you have to indefinitely keep computing the future states of the ai because you have started doing it, or that you are not allowed to add two numbers because that operation completes the calculation of suffering for the ai.
The only solution i can see is to base morality on private property: If i kill someone in the same simulation as me i take something that is not mine, and it is not ok. If i shut down the computer with a simulation, or start a simulation to see how people behave during genocide, i do not do any harm to anyone that exists or could exist independently from me, so it is ok.
> If i shut down the computer with a simulation, or start a simulation to see how people behave during genocide, i do not do any harm to anyone that exists or could exist independently from me, so it is ok.
And how does that work with children? It definitely follows some of the older thinking on the subject, but not any "modern" thinking on it. If I and my wife decide we don't want kids any more, are we free to end our children? I could claim that they can't exist indepdently of me (at least up to a certain age). It's also possible that an AI in a simulation might be able to provide enough benefit to someone to receive income, and enough to pay for its own resources. I think "could exist independent of me" is fairly ambiguous in this context.
Ultimately, this is all philosophical, and I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer, just people - walking talking examples of emergent phenomena - trying to find meaning. I actually don't think it's possible for a person for be completely consistent in behavior because of this, and at best we can hope to at least be consistent in how we perceive our actions. Thus, it doesn't surprise me that I find some of your views inconsistent, and that you likely find the same of me. We ultimately have different perceptions of what's being explained, and thus what seems entirely logical and consistent to one of us seems askew to the other. Exploring those views does have merit though, as it allows for a more comprehensive view of the subject.
I would argue that morality is not simply a philosophical matter, but also a strategy for a society to survive, that's why it changes with the technology. For instance strategy that was necessary and normal for hunter-gatherers: kill weak or extra children for whom tribe didn't have resources, seems horrible now when as a society we have resources to keep them all.
In the case when child is truly incapable to exist without the mother, (before it is born), even most of the modern thinking allows to end it. But i think this will change when we have technology to grow people from cell to child in a lab.
With children it is still easy to argue that if parents do not want them they can't kill them because they are unique and the society always needs more of them. But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!).
I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbour that allows such experiments.
> I would argue that morality is not simply a philosophical matter, but also a strategy for a society to survive
I'm not going to disagree with that. I argued the same earlier in this discussion in a more general sense.
> But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!).
Which is an argument for duplicates, but 1) as a copy gets different inputs and diverges, it is unique, in the same way the you of this second is different slightly than the you before you started reading this sentence (and throw in Ship of Theseus for flavor). 2) even if the copies aren't viewed as diffierent, what about the last copy? If you've grown an AI, deleting the last copy is eliminating something something unique, if there was any possible input that cannot be replicated.
> I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbor that allows such experiments.
The same could be said of any human experimentation that is banned. And that might be right. It's only been a relatively short time it's been in place in any enforceable way, in historical context.
I was thinking of the Bobiverse- have your head preserved for reanimation when future technology allows, only to have it declared a non-person and sold to a corporation which digitizes your brain and puts it in a satellite...
Personally, I think I would rather bet on the (reincarnation) theory that if I'm good/do the right things in this life, I'll get a better body that isn't broken next time around.
Though not a scientific donation, this is largely the plan of Bredo Morstoel, a 'corpse' (depending on how well his plan works) in Nederland, Co.
There's a festival every year that is pretty popular in town about 'Frozen Dead Guy'. They have special beer, ice-cream, coffin races, a polar-bear swim, frozen salmon tosses, and a Mr. & Mrs. Dead Guy.
I've done the daytime tour and helped stack dry-ice on the guy. Honestly, he looks like Ötzi the Ice Man now.
Don't get your hopes up. I worked in a neurology lab where they used something similar years ago. You could keep a pig / rat brain running for a few hours like this, but it would start to fall apart in other ways pretty fast.
Freezing your head might be good idea. If one day you could simulate a braina and scan a brain in sufficient detail just freezing might be enough to keep sufficient detail.
Who you are must be in chemistry of your brain not in the electricity because you are same person after epileptic seizure as before.
Does an epileptic seizure modify the slow brain wave activity? It would have less data due to a smaller sampling rate but still might be necessary to avoid "total refresh"? Have we EMPed brains before to see if they lose any prior memories?
Afaik, ECT therapy has been despised by many folk for making them forget whole weeks of their pasts.
The question is whether the electricity is causing changes or just interrupting existing flow....
This presumes that you are the same person after a seizure, or even after a nap, or even after half a minute of ordinary life, or even a unitary "person" to begin with.
Anyone here considered cryo? the only thing putting me off is being trapped in an infinite torture with some bitter robot overlord. The good thing about death is just that. No one can suffer infinitely. We get to die. I read a short story once where this kind of happens. It's the end of time and 3 people are stuck in an evil machine who keeps them alive. Then one guy kills/free's 2 of the others. Can't remember what it was called. May have been an Asimov short. As far as I know cryo can be as little as £30 a month on a life insurance plan. Backing people up will become big business if they can show everyone there is nothing metaphysical about the mind.
wow. amazing. so much came back to me reading that. was a long time ago. thanks!. But ye, before this book I was well up for cryo. Since, I've decided death is probably for me.
Immediately reminded me of that unforgettable movie in which a 1WW soldier who have lost all his sensory inputs and motor control and is still alive brain is used for experiments.
Movie title is "Johnny got his gun". No idea how mainstream it is but i suspect not that much.
If you believe nothing could be worse than death, you should consider to watch it.
If this technology pans out, and there doesn't seem to be anything fundamental against it, the future will be very different from what I imagined. Medical treatment, space travel and exploration, even retirement may have gotten a lot more interesting.
Not really. We know that oxygen-starved brain quickly destroys itself in minutes, unless very cold. So even if you can revive a brain after hours, it will not be a very good brain.
Why would anyone wait a few hours after death to do the technique? Wouldn't it make more sense to do it right away, and get the brain into its new medium? Right now there's all the limitations of something that's a nascent technology, but the methods should surely be improved as time goes on.
Rodent studies routinely use whole brain and slice tissues for long term neuro-experimentation [0]. You can keep slices alive for days on end, if you're careful [1]. Is it just that it's a whole pig brain that they used these tried and true techniques with? Ischemia isn't something to laugh at, it's very tough to deal with. But the 'ethical' issues have long been put to bed, we've been doing this since 1951 [2]
[2] McIlwain, H., Buchel, L. & Cheshire, J. D. The inorganic phosphate and phosphocreatine of Brain especially during metabolism in vitro. Biochem. J. 48, 12–20 (1951).
206 comments
[ 15.1 ms ] story [ 4087 ms ] thread"Yeah, we're raising our series A so we can ink a deal with a Chinese morgue for a steady supply of parts to stitch together, and to scale up our electricity generation to the needed amount so we don't have to depend on the odd lightning bolt, which turns out to be really rare here in Palo Alto"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb
We do not know that simply being severed from your body is simply experiencing no sensory input of any kind, and actually have a lot of reasons to expect that would not be the subjective experience for very long.
(Bizarrely, the dream pain has nothing to do with anything in real life that should have been pain. Apparently my subconscious is fine with dismemberment or stabbing or whatever, but what really bothers it is removing my orthodontic spacer from the roof of my mouth, which apparently it feels is me trying to remove the roof of my mouth. Subconsciouses are weird.)
[1]: https://www.britannica.com/science/phantom-limb-syndrome
"If it seems strange that nerve signals coming from the back can represent vision, bear in mind that your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happen to travel along different cables. Your brain is encased in absolute blackness in the vault of your skull. It doesn’t see anything. All it knows are these little signals and nothing else. And yet you perceive the world in shades of brightness and colors. Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs the light." — David Eagleman in his book Incognito.
Without the nerves connecting your toe to your brain, you are unlikely to feel the otherwise agonizing pain of having had stubbed it against a coffee table.
Think of it as taking a microprocessor in a circuit and disconnecting every one of its pins except those providing power. How would that microprocessor behave? It's various I/O pins aren't gone, their state and response just became somewhat random.
In order for these sorts of experiments to be ethical with an apparent consciousness we definitely need BCI technology that can simulate input / output stimuli, at least reasonably.
Might be, but unlikely. Both our medical and legal (executions) experience shows that most parts of the body can be removed or paralyzed without impacting consciousness. It really seems like the obvious model - that the brain alone is the center of consciousness - is the correct one.
Technically, the medical community only considers physical injury with the term 'pain', but there is growing consensus that pain can be more general (especially considering it is often subjective). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952112/
> [...] Nevertheless, the development of technology with the potential to support sentient, disembodied organs has broad ethical implications for the welfare of animals and people. “There isn’t really an oversight mechanism in place for worrying about the possible ethical consequences of creating consciousness in something that isn’t a living animal,” says Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale who worked with Sestan’s team. He says that doing so might be ethically justifiable in some cases — for instance, if it enable scientists to test drugs for degenerative brain diseases on the organs, rather than people.
Gauging awareness in a brain outside a body would probably be difficult, given that the organ’s surroundings would differ so radically from its natural environment. “We could imagine that brain could be capable of consciousness,” says George Mashour, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who studies near-death experiences. “But it’s very interesting to think about what kind of consciousness, in the absence of organs and peripheral stimulation. [...]”
It's also 'very interesting to think' how many more dimensions this could add to torture. This is the end of the article:
> [...] In the meantime, scientists and governments are left to confront the legal and ethical quandaries related to the possibility of creating a conscious brain without a body. “This really is a no-man’s land,” says Koch. “The law will probably have to evolve to keep up.”
Koch wants a broader ethical discussion to take place before any researcher tries to induce awareness in a disembodied brain. “It is a big, big step,” he says. “And once we do it, it’s impossible to reverse it.”
Sobering.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4
At least there where meetings with free soft drinks and canapes.
_Nature_ overview/discussions: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01168-9
Please make sure I am supplied with some good books to read, if at all possible.
Are you comfortable with the possibility that those who are reviving you might not be doing it for your benefit?
(If they're explicitly trying to cause me pain, that would be a no.)
And the technology is here, it's only a matter of time before this kind of abuse starts happening.
I'm not saying we should not continue researching this, as the possibilities are endless, but let's not put the pitfalls under the rug
So it can easily be made to feel pain -- just pass in the same signals the nerves would have.
Also, people who become blind later in life often describe it as "black", so I think it's reasonable to assume that's how the brain would interpret lack of sense.
That is my point.
I imagine that, if this was a possibility, quite a lot of people would be ok (or even demand it) to make available "150 years after natural death" sentences, so that they can apply it to their newly deposed dictator. Then, once the new rulers become entrenched in power and begin to like it, they can start using it on their political opponents. Prisoner exchanges between warring countries could become quite interesting. Quite likely, some people might feel inclined to hang on to their loved ones forever. Remember Terri Schiavo [1]?
Feel free to imagine more interesting scenarios. If you don't start to shudder, you're just not thinking big enough. You can watch this Black Mirror episode [2] to get you started.
This gives a whole new meaning to the expression "killer application".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5058700/
(This is a relevant YouTube video to the discussion, not spam.)
The best course of action is to rely on what was previously requested.
I will be curious if they can not only resuscitate but also influence what is left? plus would it matter if your a victim of a seizure? would there be anything left that we see as a human personality to bring back? I ask that from experience of losing a middle aged uncle to a seizure, it raises your body temperature sufficiently to kill/wipe the brain. You can coma them to stop the activity but bringing them back up from that is no guarantee anyone is home
It would be strange to return to your life after dying 10 years ago, but I'd probably take the deal.
The "what if they wake me up to torture me" scenarios seem like wild catastrophizing to me - if someone has the political power and resources to develop special brain-torture gear, rez me, and keep me alive so they can torture me, they have the political power and resources to kidnap me and torture me with knives and fire as long as they want. It'd probably even be easier for them to do it to my physical body, right here and right now.
It sounds like the real worry is "what if I wake up in a dystopian future". And, of course, once you look at that, the expected value calculation is trivial. Consider the set of futures which have sufficiently-developed research and economy to systematize the operation of and systematically execute on rezzing random frozen brains. Consider the set of futures which have that property but are also dystopian enough to rez brains for the sole purpose of torturing them. Recall that these things are in tension; the kinds of irrationalities that lead a civilization to do that kind of thing will impair them in other ways, sometimes significantly - enmity from less-extreme polities, toxic culture leading to structural inefficiency, etc. You have to reach really far to find that region of the configuration space of possible future worlds.
So look at the expected values. Yes, being tortured for a while would suck. But being alive again, and possibly even biologically immortal, has the expected value of an entire new life. And the probabilities say that being rezzed is far more likely in a good future than a bad future. Literally every stage of the expected-value calculation says that being rezzed can be expected to be a win.
Even if the optimistic scenario is true for your first 100 "rezzes", the 101st civilization that takes over after the 100th collapses might not be so nice.
EDITED TO ADD: Moreover "the kinds of irrationalities that lead a civilization to do that kind of thing" is confusing a value judgment with rationality. An extremely predatory civilization might maintain its edge through cruelty, the same way that cats seem to play with mice before killing them. That would be evil, but rational.
I hope the optimistic scenarios are true.
The comments in this thread to the tune of "anything is better than being dead" actually kind of took me by surprise.
I can conceive of a point where technology and society has developed to a place where bodies are replaced after death with something that's worth "living" in again, but that's a long way from wanting to be a brain in a vat purely because it means I'm not technically dead.
Seeing as we don't have full eye transplants yet, it seems possible (at lest with near future tech) that they could resuscitate your brain but not your other I/O peripherals, including your eyes. To misquote Harlan Ellison, you may have no mouth with which to scream.
It seems to me that your average case would involve either total darkness or the worst case of phantom limb ever. Or even worse: they might give you eyes, but no one to turn the pages for you.
I'd imagine that if we do establish "IO" that "text" would be the first/easiest type of data. It might be encoded in a strange way, but, well, I'll have plenty of time to adapt...
Without these signals, we have no clue whether you’ll be in immense confusion, anxiety, sadness or bliss. It could very well be much worse than death,
Are you ok with that gamble?
Yes.
"A Living Soul" by P. C. Jersild is amazing sci-fi book exploring this. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Norvik-Press-English-Swedish/d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Jersild
- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7
Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467
TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED
If specimen 46, Vat 7 experiences a romantic relationship, our corporation will gain valuable research on emotional development past nihilism stage. Suitable partners are: Specimen 114, Vat 7 Specimen 126, Vat 7 Specimen 67, Vat 89 (pending switch)
Code monkey not say this out loud
Code monkey not crazy, just proud
This game was a treasure trove of thought-provoking quotations, many of which can be found on WikiQuote. [1]
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri
Your point still stands of course.
Maybe people with locked-in syndrome could provide some reports of what it's like. It's not the exact same, but it may be similar.
All evidence we have regarding long stays in solitary confinement or sensory deprivation indicates everyone trends towards psychosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Dowell's_Head
Or your enemies took power, and when they were going through the vats for payback they picked yours (along with many others). If you think you have no enemies, or that you know them all personally, you are better than me.
If you are a person of color, white supremacists are your enemy, even if you have never personally met them.
Etc.
Your remark comes across to me like "I live an extremely privileged and cushy life and I think that's completely the norm. I'm not interested in understanding the reality of people for whom that's not the norm."
And what part of being targeted for skin color is a "consequence that come[s] from believing in the supernatural?"
if reducing complex issues into simple dichotomies works for you, I'm not going to convince you otherwise. But the fact that you need such crutches tells me all I need to know about this conversation.
If you're not convinced, try changing your frame of reference. Don't think of white males as being privileged. Trying to convince people of that is often a useless endeavour.
Instead, recognize the disadvantage PoC have. Most reasonable people will believe PoC have a harder time than white people. That's what white privilege is. It's not dealing with the additional hardships that PoC deal with. White privilege doesn't mean having the world being handed to you because you're white. It means not having the world taken away just because you're not white.
If you ask someone to name three friends, they wouldn't consider all friendly people, they would consider their actual friends.
If you ask someone to name three enemies you would expect them to name specific people they actually know and have interacted with, not specific people that are known to hate their race or belief but they have had no direct interaction with.
But I imagine lots of minority members et al are keenly aware of specific people who are generally against their minority group who have caused them, personally, harm because of it.
If they publicly start their view that "X person personally harmed me" it is usually unprovable and the statement just makes their own problems worse for various reasons.
Thus my impression that you must have an awfully cushy life that you are projecting as the norm when there is zero reason to see it as such.
You made the assumption that I considered them enemies, or that they would even know who I am. If I am an identifiable member of the wrong community, social group, or race from the point of view of the mob in power, I don't have to consider them my enemy in order for them to see me (or my family, or friends) as one. Do you want to contemplate the possibility of genocides, of which we have seen plenty in the last 30 years, being replaced by "vaticides"? Because once the technology allows it, it will happen.
I've lived through this kind of historic upheaval once already; I know that of which I speak. The point I'm making is that any new technology can and will eventually be used by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and that the likelihood for that to happen is directly proportional to its potential for good. We better make sure that potential good is really in balance with the potential bad before we commit to bringing it to life (pun intended).
If, say, you're a black lesbian feminist, you can live the most saintly life, there are plenty of people who are your enemies, and who'd delight at the idea of being able to hurt you. Despite never having anything done to you.
Or, if that's too contemporary, you can be the nicest Jewish person in all of Hitler's Germany, and it still wouldn't save you.
If that's too Godwin's law, just be poor. There is a good chunk of people who'd be perfectly OK with experimenting on you, just because you're a drain on society's resources. And we can continue on - there are any number of axes along which society separates, and there are always people who consider "the other" an enemy, or, worse, something not even human.
Enmity and dehumanization isn't necessarily mutual, but you need a very strong support system to be able to ignore that it still exists.
Your contribution is not wasted however. First brain that was able to talk to the world and received full human rights was Peter Thiel's brain.
You'd be ok with effectively being blind, deaf, mute, paralyzed, and probably brain damaged, in the name of science?
Sure, at first, the peacefulness of absolute sensory deprivation would probably feel pretty relaxing.
But then, it never ends. An eternity (or as long as your brain was kept alive) of nothing. You see nothing. You hear nothing. You feel, taste, and smell nothing.
If you're lucky, you'd start building a fake reality to imagine yourself in, like a dream. Over time, maybe you'd accept this reality as being real. People that lose a sense such as sight often gain an enhancement in another sense such as hearing. Maybe with the loss of all senses, the brain's imagination could gain more power.
Maybe it wouldn't be that bad, after all.
1: https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-for-you-to-awaken-aft...
[1] https://www.somagame.com/
When beating heart corpses (technically brain dead but body is alive) have their organs removed, in some cases the bodies go through symptoms of a live human being killed by vivisection. These are generally ignored.
Let's hope our understanding of brain death is fully and completely correct.
When asked some question post surgery, she blurted "I could really use a beer!" She didn't drink, but the young male donor of her organs who died in a motorcycle crash did.
She wrote a book about her experience. Initially, she had bizarre dreams, as if tapping into the psyche of her organ donor. Over time, those stopped.
Mention of this tends to not go over well on HN, though it would be easy enough to google who got the first heart-lung transplant, find her book and read it to confirm if I'm making this up or misremembering it or if it's a true story (at least insofar as me remembering that she claimed such things).
I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities.
Thanks.
I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities.
So would I.
I'm not talking about most such changes or statistical significance. I'm talking about one specific case that was unusually well documented and highly scrutinized that potentially supports the idea that "souls" -- or something we might describe with that word -- might actually be real.
A high percentage of people go to church or otherwise have some kind of spiritual belief. But some kind of scientific affirmation that this isn't simply adult thumb sucking and there may be something to it seems pretty uncommon.
I found her story interesting from that angle.
But, I mean, if your mind is made up that souls are nonsense, then you are probably not the target audience for my comment.
I don't personally think it's hugely important whether one prefers the framing of self over soul. The woman told a tale that credibly suggested she got something of his consciousness in the exchange, not just his physical organs.
I realize it matters a whole lot to most people which framing gets used. Again, this is why I did my best to qualify it.
I think if you’d said “‘self’ is more than just the (brain|connectome)”, a lot more people would agree with you.
The existence of the self, and it being seated in physical organs, is noncontroversial, and in no way particular associated with the spiritual belief of people who go to church. The idea that the self is seated somewhere distinct from the body—the soul—is. So, I think that the “framing” is quite relevant to the connections you tried to draw upthread.
Which isn't to say it's not an interesting anecdote (though, on its own, of very little probative value) either way.
It seemed pertinent to that line of thinking.
There's a fairly rich history of Western Christians who were serious scientists and also sincere believers in God who argued that belief is a matter of faith, God is not provable and there is zero contradiction between being both a Christian and a scientist.
I don't have some personal need to relitigate that point. I'm very aware that some people frame things in terms of religion and some don't.
I don't personally feel it is critically important to pick a camp in order to see the story this woman told as intriguing and potentially casting light upon or at least calling into question some of our current framing concerning brain death being the single most important detail.
I know it's a touchy subject for most people. Whether they believe in a soul and a religious/spiritual framing or not, they tend to feel strongly that the other camp is in the wrong and that this is a really big deal.
I generally agree with the conclusion that "being a believer" is a matter of faith. Some people believe. Some don't.
I believe in souls and reincarnation and so forth. My ex did not. Everyone swore that a marriage could not work if you didn't have the same belief system in that regard.
We both believed in the American Constitutional right of freedom to believe as you saw fit. It was the only thing we didn't fight about in two decades of non stop arguing.
Having different points of view in this matter had no bearing on the decision to divorce.
I'd love to think that my parents and grandparents aren't just gone when they died, that they are somewhere else, alive, functioning, happy. But all evidence points another way.
Here is a past discussion of a BBC article related to the subject, about 2.5 years old.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931113
It's sort of like being given a choice at the time of death. Would you rather everything ended now, or do you want to opt for a small chance at future life if there's also a chance that life consists entirely of torture of one type or another.
Death does. Pain and torture don't deprive you of your future. They are all about what you have to go through to get to that future, and possibly alter how you are physically and/or mentally in that future.
At an extreme end of the spectrum is complete brain death, but just before that might be extreme brain damage. Would you choose a reality in which you're so mentally diminished that your existence is comprised entirely of terror and confusion? Opting into that, even the possibility of that, especially since once you're in that state, you may no longer be capable of changing your mind?
Even for people that don't believe in the religious version of hell, some might consider this the closest equivalent. The question then becomes, would you subject yourself to the possibility of being in a hell equivalent for an indeterminate amount of time after your death to provide an indeterminate amount of benefit to science?
> If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose
That assumption only works if you assume you can't be brought back, even as a brain in a jar. It doesn't make sense to use assumptions based on death being the ultimate end when reasoning about death not being the ultimate end.
> If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help.
By that reasoning, if there was a program where you could donate your body to science while you're still alive and they could do any tests they want, including live vivisection, would you do so? If not, why is that any different?
They take your time when you go through them, and possibly break your body in some way, which reduces the number of things you can do in the future.
Of course there may be scenarios where accepting pain or death gives you some advantage, but in that case the pain is not bad! (think dying to keep your children alive, cutting your hand to not die in the desert).
> It doesn't make sense to use assumptions based on death being the ultimate end when reasoning about death not being the ultimate end.
My assumptions are that brain is something that can be simulated on a computer, there is no soul, and that the people who die and are buried cannot be brought back to life. So my choices are either to become brain in a jar for experiments, or feed earthworms.
> By that reasoning, if there was a program where you could donate your body to science while you're still alive and they could do any tests they want
No, because if i am still alive, i can do something more useful for me with my body, but when i am dead, (or at a point when i want euthanasia), i do not have any use of my body, and hell with a small chance of helping people i love is better than nothingness.
I think the same regarding the brain. My point is that we are discussing what if your donated brain is revived to the point of consciousness, but without a body, and perhaps without the experimenters realizing consciousness exists (or realizing it and not considering your consciousness worth the same consideration of a full person).
When reasoning about the possibility of that scenario, which is what this thread is about, I don't think it makes sense to use assumptions about death being the ultimate end, because this is specifically about the case where that is false, because you're a brain in jar with consciousness after death.
> No, because if i am still alive, i can do something more useful for me with my body
Not all live people have bodies that can be used. Not all people with useless bodies are useless. Also, this reasoning leads us to having no consideration for any living beings besides those that can communicate and be of use. Is it okay to torture animals for science, if there is a way to do so without causing pain? Should we not consider the case of a brain in a jar then, and whether it feels pain? It's your choice whether you want to subject yourself to the possibility of a tortured existence after death, but I would rather have some laws in place and information on what to expect (i.e. existing cases where we have reason to believe that the regarding the legal status of after death brain testing than going into the future blind.
There's a possibility of upsides (science advancement without torture, possibly life of a sort after death), but also the possibility of downsides (that life after death might be indefinite mental torture). It's not that I'm against donating my brain, it's that I'm against donating my brain given the minimal amount of information we have on outcomes, and how that relates to the extreme mngative worst case I can imagine.
The question is, if we map out a matrix of possibilities with outcomes of no science advancement, science advancement, second life on one axis, and no consciousness, consciousness but not you (amnesia), your consciousness but impaied, your consciousness close to your current capabilities on the other axis, some of those paired outcomes are what I would consider completely unacceptable, and others would be absolutely wonderful, and then there's various middling levels in between. The problem is there's no idea currently what the chances of any of those are, so am I willing to gamble a completely unacceptable outcome for the chance of a wonderful outcome given no odds?
But until that the choices we have here are nothingness and an experiment with unknown outcome. Given this choice i don't see any experiment that is worse than the nothingness.
Btw. if you agree that brain is equivalent to a program that can run on a computer, then you should also agree that pain, infinite torture and other "hellish" things are not a big deal, they are just pointless computations.
That only follows if you think that about your life right now. If you think it's not a big deal right now, then it's not a big deal if you're a brain in a jar. If it is a big deal right now, then it is a big deal if you're a brain in a jar.
Pain is useful for living organisms as a variable to use in our fitness functions (minds) that allows us to avoid situations that decrease our survival rate. Ir may be mostly useless for a brain in a jar, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be ignored.
One can make an argument that complete rationality should discard feelings and work only on whether something is useful or not. I think that argument is incorrect when taken to that extreme, as it looks at a shorter horizon than the evolutionary scale which has produced us, to good effect. I would argue that the social aspect of our species is what has allowed us to not only thrice, but completely dominate the environment we are in. To ignore our empathy is to ignore what has brought us to this point.
We can say that a brain in a jar in pain should not be catered to because it has nothing to provide (which also might be incorrect), but by that reasoning we should also say that the person in hospice with weeks or months left to life with no relatives should not be catered to. Should we cause pain to or end the existence of each of those without any regard to their own feelings? We could just as easily use the person in hospice for testing. Amazing scientific discoveries could be unearthed.
But if we agree that emotion has played a positive role in the development of the species, then "hellish" things and the avoidance of them is not pointless computation.
> But until that the choices we have here are nothingness and an experiment with unknown outcome. Given this choice i don't see any experiment that is worse than the nothingness.
Given the known outcome of coming back after death for an existence of even known time, say one week, where that time comprised of pain and suffering exclusively, I would opt to not have that time, thus opting for nothingness. Given an outcome I would not choose, and an outcome I would choose, it them becomes an equation of what is the likelihood of each, and how much to I want or want to avoid each.
Given that the possible negative outcome is as close to the biblical interpretation of hell as I can imagine, and one of the benefits of being an atheist is not having to worry about that, I'm not in a hurry to opt into something that then provides that possibility. That's what I was getting at before.
Do you think that simply carrying out a computation can be immoral? I think no, and the difference between experimenting on a real person and a person in your simulation is that in the second case nothing would exist if you didn't spend your resources to run the simulation, (or in the original context spend resources to revive a discarded brain).
> Given that the possible negative outcome is as close to the biblical interpretation of hell as I can imagine, and one of the benefits of being an atheist is not having to worry about that
Interesting, i have never thought of this as a benefit, to me the hell seemed better because there you do not die, and logically have a chance to get out, because of love and forgiveness preached by some parts of the bible.
Yes. If something can experience pain, I think it's immoral to cause pain when it's unnecessary. If something is sentient, I think it's immoral to stop sentience without reason.
> Do you think that simply carrying out a computation can be immoral? I think no, and the difference between experimenting on a real person and a person in your simulation is that in the second case nothing would exist if you didn't spend your resources to run the simulation, (or in the original context spend resources to revive a discarded brain).
Yes. If you run a simulation that works on sentient AI's, then IMO mistreating them is immoral. I view them as life, and creating life comes with responsibilities.
Importantly, I think this view is important otherwise morality breaks down entirely. There's a chance we're all in a simulation right now. Does that mean nothing we do to each other can be immoral? What if we could prove we were in a simulation? That that free people form moral constraints?
> Interesting, i have never thought of this as a benefit, to me the hell seemed better because there you do not die, and logically have a chance to get out, because of love and forgiveness preached by some parts of the bible.
I'm not a bible scholar, but to my understanding, you go to hell for "eternity". Given the mystical nature of the whole supposition, I don't think it's useful to believe it existence is correct but the unescapability is not.
exactly, but it doesn't help if we say that you have to indefinitely keep computing the future states of the ai because you have started doing it, or that you are not allowed to add two numbers because that operation completes the calculation of suffering for the ai.
The only solution i can see is to base morality on private property: If i kill someone in the same simulation as me i take something that is not mine, and it is not ok. If i shut down the computer with a simulation, or start a simulation to see how people behave during genocide, i do not do any harm to anyone that exists or could exist independently from me, so it is ok.
And how does that work with children? It definitely follows some of the older thinking on the subject, but not any "modern" thinking on it. If I and my wife decide we don't want kids any more, are we free to end our children? I could claim that they can't exist indepdently of me (at least up to a certain age). It's also possible that an AI in a simulation might be able to provide enough benefit to someone to receive income, and enough to pay for its own resources. I think "could exist independent of me" is fairly ambiguous in this context.
Ultimately, this is all philosophical, and I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer, just people - walking talking examples of emergent phenomena - trying to find meaning. I actually don't think it's possible for a person for be completely consistent in behavior because of this, and at best we can hope to at least be consistent in how we perceive our actions. Thus, it doesn't surprise me that I find some of your views inconsistent, and that you likely find the same of me. We ultimately have different perceptions of what's being explained, and thus what seems entirely logical and consistent to one of us seems askew to the other. Exploring those views does have merit though, as it allows for a more comprehensive view of the subject.
In the case when child is truly incapable to exist without the mother, (before it is born), even most of the modern thinking allows to end it. But i think this will change when we have technology to grow people from cell to child in a lab.
With children it is still easy to argue that if parents do not want them they can't kill them because they are unique and the society always needs more of them. But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!).
I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbour that allows such experiments.
I'm not going to disagree with that. I argued the same earlier in this discussion in a more general sense.
> But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!).
Which is an argument for duplicates, but 1) as a copy gets different inputs and diverges, it is unique, in the same way the you of this second is different slightly than the you before you started reading this sentence (and throw in Ship of Theseus for flavor). 2) even if the copies aren't viewed as diffierent, what about the last copy? If you've grown an AI, deleting the last copy is eliminating something something unique, if there was any possible input that cannot be replicated.
> I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbor that allows such experiments.
The same could be said of any human experimentation that is banned. And that might be right. It's only been a relatively short time it's been in place in any enforceable way, in historical context.
I'd rather stay dead.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/brain_in_a_box
https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse/dp/B01L08...
There's a festival every year that is pretty popular in town about 'Frozen Dead Guy'. They have special beer, ice-cream, coffin races, a polar-bear swim, frozen salmon tosses, and a Mr. & Mrs. Dead Guy.
I've done the daytime tour and helped stack dry-ice on the guy. Honestly, he looks like Ötzi the Ice Man now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days
http://www.frozendeadguydays.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
I had no idea humanity achieved synthetic blood. This is from the study:
>a haemoglobin-based, acellular, non-coagulative, echogenic, and cytoprotective perfusate that promotes recovery from anoxia
Am I the only one excited by what viable synthetic blood might mean for blood banks?
Study is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1099-1
Or you can make it yourself per: http://www.alzet.com/products/guide_to_use/cfs_preparation.h...
Artificial blood is way trickier, but there are a lot of advancements being made. It's really exciting!
Who you are must be in chemistry of your brain not in the electricity because you are same person after epileptic seizure as before.
Afaik, ECT therapy has been despised by many folk for making them forget whole weeks of their pasts.
The question is whether the electricity is causing changes or just interrupting existing flow....
You are same enough for practical purposes like holding relationships and retaining knowledge and skills.
Is it this?
Movie title is "Johnny got his gun". No idea how mainstream it is but i suspect not that much.
If you believe nothing could be worse than death, you should consider to watch it.
https://youtu.be/WM8bTdBs-cw
Rodent studies routinely use whole brain and slice tissues for long term neuro-experimentation [0]. You can keep slices alive for days on end, if you're careful [1]. Is it just that it's a whole pig brain that they used these tried and true techniques with? Ischemia isn't something to laugh at, it's very tough to deal with. But the 'ethical' issues have long been put to bed, we've been doing this since 1951 [2]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28744893
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9914290
[2] McIlwain, H., Buchel, L. & Cheshire, J. D. The inorganic phosphate and phosphocreatine of Brain especially during metabolism in vitro. Biochem. J. 48, 12–20 (1951).